TERRE HAUTE— Some people say that U.S. society took a wrong turn when we stopped building houses with front porches. I’d add to that the juncture at which the â€œpersonnel officeâ€ became â€œhuman resourcesâ€ and the five-minute firing — even of longtime employees — became the rule, not the exception.
Did I say â€œfiringâ€?
Oh, sorry. It’s â€œlaying offâ€ or â€œbuying out.â€ No one gets fired anymore in the land of employment euphemisms except the contestants on Captain Comb-over’s TV show.
The wholesale cashiering of hundreds or thousands of hard-working human beings is a â€œcontraction.â€ The closing of the factory where their mammas and granddaddies worked before them is a mere â€œdown-sizing.â€
When corporate push comes to shove, we watch our fellow citizens, our neighbors and relatives — ourselves! — be one-dimensionalized, stripped of dignity and trustworthiness and escorted off the premises like some smelly derelict who’s camped out at the receptionist’s desk and keeps talking about voices in his head.
I am thinking about all this because many friends of mine had their jobs taken away from them last week in California.
I refuse to say they â€œlostâ€ them. That implies carelessness on their part, an active role. No way. My friends were deemed expendable by a corporate entity for which all of them have labored for more than three decades, and they will be paid varying amounts of money to go away.
Many more â€œpositionsâ€ will be â€œeliminatedâ€ before this particular bloodletting is through, but they are union jobs under a contract that spares its members the humiliation of the instant firing.
For the folks without that protection, this was the deal: For 30, 35 or 38 years, they came into the building at least five days a week (except for vacations) and went out at night. They had keys to their offices and file cabinets, passwords for their voicemail and the collective computer system, and they were encouraged to attend the company Christmas party when such festivities were in the budget.
Then, these same men and women were summoned to â€œH.R.â€ where a script was read and a packet titled â€œHow to Survive a Layoffâ€ was handed to them. Most were then given only a few minutes to collect their briefcase or handbag and get out of the building.
The next time they come back — to pack up decades of files, notebooks, printouts and awards — they will be wearing stick-on â€œVisitorâ€ patches and they will be â€œaccompaniedâ€ by one of their former colleagues who was not assassinated in the purge.
My friends who got the boot happen to be journalists. (They still are, they just don’t have journalism jobs anymore.) But the way they were severed from their workplace is echoed by workers in industries all across the land.
Every day — in companies that make pharmaceuticals, automobiles, compact discs, reinforced steel, tires, paper, travel reservations, textiles, glass, even the beds of old and sick people — somebody in H.R. is reading somebody else a script, handing over a packet and giving the doomed employee five minutes to get the hell out.
A woman I heard about earlier this week — in â€œthe service industry sectorâ€ — discovered she was part of her company’s most recent pool of victims only when she couldn’t sign on to her computer and had to ask someone what was wrong.
The company bosses had, of course, let her complete a huge project for them before they ordered the tech department to make her persona non grata in their realm of cyberspace.
A good pal who has worked in H.R. most of her life and has been on both sides of the game — the ax wielder and the axed — answered some questions about the five-minute firing. For obvious reasons her identity will be concealed. I’ll call her â€œGingerâ€ for this column.
Ginger’s one-line summation of the popular practice: â€œIt isn’t worth the ill-will you create.â€
Why, I asked her, when people are fired for purely economic reasons, not because of anything they’ve done wrong, are they suddenly treated like criminals?
The answer is fear, but fear based on what might happen, not on what’s likely or — heaven forfend — on what the axee deserves.
â€œIt’s seen as a security issue, especially because of computers,â€ Ginger said. â€œCompanies are into control, big time, and this is what the lawyers tell them they have to do. The lawyers drive everything — and the H.R. people are the ones who have to carry it out.â€
But, but, I protested, what are the odds that longtime, trusted employees like my newspaper friends are suddenly going to behave out of character and turn into destructive lunatics?
Ginger said the odds don’t matter anymore than the fired person’s unsullied work record matters.
â€œIt’s miserable, cruel and inhumane,â€ she said, â€œand it can’t help create bad feelings among the people still there. If anything, it creates people who then want to do harm to the company.â€
People have been known to sue, Ginger said, so everyone is viewed as a potential litigant. Once in a great while an angry axee has gone into a computer system and wreaked havoc, so everyone is seen as a potential cyber-terrorist.
â€œComputer access is the first thing we have to pull,â€ she said.
Of the many people to whom Ginger has had to read the script — â€œIt’s all legaleseâ€ — most are stunned but civilized. Probably this is because most people are civilized even when they have gotten canned.
But not everyone goes quietly.
â€œI’ve had people throw their laptop at me,â€ Ginger said.
Because I’ve known Ginger for 18 years, I know she suffers when she has to read somebody the script and hand over the packet. I’ve seen her cry and lose sleep and her appetite.
â€œI hate it,â€ she said, â€œbut every time I have to do it, I try to treat the person the way I would want to be treated, as if it were happening to me. I try to be compassionate. As much dignity and respect as I can give them — within the parameters given to me by corporate — I do.â€
Not all Ginger’s cohorts share her willingness to plug into other folks’ pain.
â€œSome H.R. people just become machines,â€ she said. â€œThey just process people out. As I said, it’s inhumane.â€
Yes it is. And, increasingly, it’s the American way.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

I liked this column. Whenever I see a coworker get fired, it's kind of a depressing situation because they really do try to rush them out. They usually fire them early in the morning before most people are there, then they try to hurry them out of the building so no one can see them go and they can't stop to talk to anyone.

I've never understood why compassion is so difficult for managers to display in such situations.